The intelligent and sensitive way Britain’s top managers are dealing with a variety of difficult and delicate industrial negotiations put me in mind of comments made some time ago by an articulate, but rather red colleague.

They went somewhat along these lines. A degree in management, for example, in Japan or the United States lasts several years and is made up of a variety of complex modules, business planning, cash flow, man management and so on.

Attend a similar course in Great Britain and, on your first day, you receive a sealed envelope to be opened on the date you graduate.

Students are then free to spend the rest of the course sleeping, drinking, and discussing the relative merits of Tellytubbies and Countdown (Countdown satisfying the written and mathematical requirements, Tellytubbies the human resources module).

On graduation the mysterious envelope is ritually opened and the great wisdom inside imparted: “Make them work harder for less.”

I used to regard this as the rather eccentric ramblings of an unreconstructed conspiracy theorist, but now I’m beginning to wonder… Richard Bowen, Farrar Street, York.